Daring to be Different: Jamie Stuart's NYFF Coverage

It's during film festivals, when everyone and their mother is reporting on the latest movies, that I feel the most redundant. As a journalist among hundreds of other press, I feel like it's especially difficult to break through the clutter and make my voice or view or reporting be heard. In our current media-glutted society, where everyone's interview with film director X is nearly identical to everyone else's interview with film director X, you have to wonder: What is the point?

But then I stumbled upon Jamie Stuart's first New York Film Festival video dispatch: witty, strange, artful and kind of eye-winkingly pretentious in a manner appropriate to the New York Film Fest, the video is utterly different than everything else that's out there. At the same time as Stuart reveals the pomp and passion of the NYFF, he also manages to undercut the whole thing. His exclusive Wes Anderson interview reveals little concrete details about the director, but that seems to be the point. What interview really does?

As for my own NYFF first weekend thoughts, I could say how much I believe Ira Sach's "Married Life" -- which brilliantly strides a fine line of self-conscious '50s satire and probing, poignant drama -- has been undersold by critics. Or how the similarly Hitchcock-inflected "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" is a haunting portrait of human lies and cruelties. Or how "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" looks and feels better than it actually is. But you've probably heard all that before.